double

A very hot day in Trebon. Before lunch, I did a short row with my son Dominik (12) to check the setting of the double. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test the sculls with the Macon blades, because our other son Robin (11) was out in the single.

We did a few practice starts and then a full 500m at the end. I had forgotten my SpeedCoach at the hotel, so the workout was captured through Garmin Connect, and stroke rates are off.

In the afternoon, I had a few work related calls. I was glad to be inside because the heat outside was getting unbearable. At the end of the afternoon, Romana and I went out to train in the double. It was a nice row. We did a warming up, then 3x250m with 500m rest, and then a long cooling down.

Spent most of the day running errands and doing some work in the garden. I grilled some nice steaks for lunch.

At the end of the afternoon we headed to the rowing club. Romana and I arrived earlier than the Masters Men’s Pair, so we took some time to check the rigging of our double Orca. All OK.

First a warming up and some training starts.

The high stroke rates in the beginning are our usual drill. Starting to row with arms only, then arms+body, then half slide, 3/4 slide, and finally on to full slide.

Pazdi and Krocan weren’t ready yet, so we did the first 500m with race start on our own.

Then a longer rest paddle. A training start with Pazdi and Krocan next to us in the pair, and finally the second 500m. We lined up the boats and off we went. The pair was leading slightly out of the start and they managed to keep the lead all the way to the end. I called “go” with 200m to go and increased the stroke rate.

Romana is a “feel” rower. She doesn’t need any gadgets, is not very interested in looking at graphs and playing with data. But this time she wondered aloud whether the stroke rate increase had increased boat speed. Let’s check the graph.

The static chart is not very easy for reading the stroke rate, so let’s look at the flex chart:

So yes, there seems to be an increase in pace. But what is interesting is that the pace seems to increase even more when we drop the stroke rate slightly after a few strokes of the sprint. Here are the comparison charts for 500m take 1 vs take 2:

The second 500m was 5 seconds faster. We rowed it in identical conditions. Same part of the lake. Same weather (mirror flat water, no wind).

Then we did another loop of the lake together with the pair. On the 3km straight stretch from Sirka to Rokle, Romana and I rowed really well together. We fell into a nice rhythm at stroke rate 23. It didn’t feel hard at all. Our timing was just perfect, and we moved from rowing slightly behind the pair to passing them and finishing about 50m ahead of them. Nice row. Everything just clicked.

You can see how my heart rate nicely stays in the very narrow blue band during the entire 3km stretch (7 minutes to 19 minutes) . I was watching the SpeedCoach during the row and when the timing was perfect, the pace improved from 2:12 to 2:09. A few times the pace dropped to 2:16, but focusing on timing brought that back to 2:12 easily.

The pair were wondering what was going on. They were visibly working hard and we passed them so easily. That 3km stretch was the one that brought out the smiles.

I headed to the lake for a row with my brother-in-law Tomas. I left work at 1pm, to get the row done before the afternoon series of conference calls would start.

While I was driving, the 5pm call was moved to 2pm. The logic behind that was that the US participant couldn’t make it, and my European colleagues didn’t want to have a call at Friday Happy Hour time. I only found out after the row.

At the rowing club, I found a rather tired Tomas. He had had a party the evening before, and he had slept on a patio, but there had been a pretty violent thunderstorm around midnight. (Romana and I got up and frantically started closing windows. Lightning was visible at a frequency of more than one per second. In our street, one tree fell.)

OK, we would just do a quick round and we would do starts practice and a few short bursts.

On the rowing data side, I switched to the Leaflet open source library for interactive maps and I am glad I did. The Google Maps never really worked, and the Leaflet API is very user friendly. It was pretty easy to figure out how to automatically zoom the map to the level that just fits the entire row. I also added a few layers (satellite, street, outdoors, nautical) to play with. Here is the result:

Maps are nothing revolutionary, of course, but having a user-friendly library opens possibilities for map based representation of rowing and weather data. Plenty of ideas, very little time to implement.

We drove home from Pardubice in the morning, arriving home around lunch time. It was raining in Brno. Temperatures have dropped by 15 degrees C overnight.

But Romana and I found a window without rain by carefully studying the online weather radar and we used it to the max. It was quite windy and choppy but that didn’t stop us from doing a lot of technique drills. As a result, we managed to row well in the chop and when we reached the quiet areas of the lake, we were flying (at steady state pace).

We got enthusiastic and did a race start, and two race pace intervals of 15 strokes each.

Technique drill between 2k and 3k resulting in no stroke rate recorded

A nice row. When we were cleaning the boat, it started to rain again.

The two rows in the double of this weekend were both great, and they confirmed one thing. As a result of rowing with the Empower Oarlock and the constant direct feedback, combined with the analysis done at rowsandall.com, I have gradually made small incremental changes on my technique, trying to make the boat go faster. Both Romana and Tomas confirmed that I have made a fundamental change in my stroke, and they had to get used to it. But both confirmed that when they managed to fall into the same groove as I, we were going relatively fast.

Rowing in the double without the Empower Oarlock, I set up the SpeedCoach to show meters per stroke. I find that this metric really shows effectiveness of rowing, with two pitfalls:

Do not compare meters/stroke at different stroke rates

Do not compare over longer distances

It is a useful metric to monitor stroke to stroke differences at constant stroke rate. In the headwind intervals, we were rowing well when we reached just over 10 meters/stroke at 21 spm. In the tailwind intervals this was about a meter further.

Another heat wave day. I decided to cross train, cycle to work (15km) and, after only half a day of work, cycle home (15km), which was a good endurance workout in the heat. I took the afternoon off and did some work around the house, helped by my son Dominik.

I didn’t know the route through the city center is shorter:

Saturday

We drove to Pardubice, where we celebrated my youngest son’s eleventh birthday at my mother-in-law’s place. Big lunch. Then coffee with birthday cake. Then unwrapping of gifts, followed by a refreshing hour of splashing in the pool.

At 5pm, my brother-in-law Tomas and I, as well as my daughter Lenka and her boyfriend took off to the University rowing center in Pardubice (where Tomas is coaching). Tomas and I took a double, and Lenka and Vasek would row a quad with two Pardubice student girls.

I fitted the double out with my GoPro camera, because I wanted to film this workout.

Then we were busy getting the girls (+ one boy) out on the water, and in the hassle I forgot to put on my heart rate belt. I only noticed that after the row.

I also forgot to record the cooling down on the SpeedCoach (because I was pretty exhausted by the time we started the cooling down). So for the entire row, I only have the Garmin Forerunner recording:

The workout was great. The only minus was that we got terribly waked three times by a waterskier. Normally water skiing happens on a lake not far from Pardubice, but this guy decided it was a good idea to do water skiing.

I also noted that Stand-Up Paddle boarding has reached Pardubice. There was a SUP rental station 500m upstream from the rowing club, so there we would row through about 15 paddle boarding beginners. Exciting!

One of the wakes must have washed my GoPro off our front deck. We ended the row without camera. It’s a pity I don’t have the footage, because it was a good workout and we wanted to look at some technical flaws. I am not too depressed about losing the camera. I was a very early adopter of the GoPro, so I am due for an upgrade! 😉

The workout was 2x(8×45″/1:15″)/5min. The 8 intervals were chosen to fit nicely into the 4km stretch of river that we rowed on. It was an interesting experience. There were intervals where Tomas was perfectly in sync with my rhythm, and there we hit 35spm easily with good pace. But about half of the intervals were “miss”. We were slightly out of sync, which means that the boat suddenly feels heavy, you have difficulty getting the stroke rate up, and about 20 seconds into the interval you feel the lactate rush to your legs.

A week in the mountains with my family, including a friend of Lenka. We stayed at Romana’s family cottage in Paseky nad Jizerou, but we also did a 3 day trek of about 50km, doing a 900m climb to the Czech Republic’s highest mountain Snezka on the first day.

Today

Back from the mountains but doing a week of vacation at home. We have some painting to do and a lot of work in the garden. We also want to do some excursions in South Moravia.

This morning, my brother-in-law Tomas arrived from Pardubice for a row in the double. It was a very windy day, so we rowed up to the castle in the relatively protected Svratka river gorge. A first training together after a long time, we decided to “just row” and enjoy the water. It was great.

On Friday night I was the serious, boring guy. Focused on my singles race, I started drinking water after two glasses of wine. Om Saturday night they made fun of me and I eased up on my limits. Romana and I had a nice dinner together, and then we joined the others at the beer brewery terrace:

It was a fun night. We saw the fireworks at 11, and then we walked to our hotel and went to bed.

Saturday

2x

First race at 11am. Masters C 2x. I rowed with Vojta Cernak from Perun Ostrava. We rowed four trainings together, two in Brno and two in Ostrava (Mordor). The favorites of the races were Petr Mitas and Martin Polasek. And then there were a few other dangerous doubles.

Tailwind. We did a few fantastic practice starts, but our race start was not so good and we were in last position. Of course we quickly corrected that, but Polasek/Mitas were ahead of us. We raced in lane 6. Petr and Martin raced in lane 1. That made it difficult to judge their advantage. I stroked and didn’t watch them. After about 200m we were clear of the redt of the pack, and with 600m to go we were a couple of lengths ahead of the pack and one length behind Petr and Martin.

At that point I called “go”. We were behind and needed to do something, and we were leading the rest of the field by enough to risk.

We didn’t catch them, finishing a few seconds behind them, and with a huge gap behind us and the rest of the field. We had rowed well and finished according the expectations.

A third silver medal to my collection of this weekend.

8+

The last race for me and also the very final race of the weekend was, at 3:30pm, the Masters Men’s eight. Four boats only. We hadn’t trained together since our win in Prague. Our opponents were a team of the best rowers from Prague, a combination of the best rowers from Moravia, among others Petr Mitas, Martin Polasek, my double partner Vojta Cernak, and my brother in law Tomas. We are a pure club eight from Brno. The fourth boat was a pure club team from Prague.

So we were underdogs. The rest of this blog will be a picture blog:

Race prepDiscussing tactics

Crossing the finish lineGold medal!Happy team

The race was a thriller. We were lucky that we racted to the starting signal promptly and got a meter or so on Prague. Then we built that out to half a length. We rowed in lane 1, with Prague right next to us in lane 2. Their cox ess a 15 year old girl and every time she called a power ten, we heard her child’s voice announcing that we were going to be in trouble. To make matters worse, our cox led us into the buoys, so on every stroke our port side, including me, was praying not to hit a buoy, or worse, cstch a crab.

The two other boats, including the Moravian selection, were falling behind.

We won by half a length in front of a finish area full of Brno fans, so the cheers were great.